Only today have I heard about the nursing executives and that the first wave of them have been rolled out as replacements placed somewhere between care assistants and nurses, so why won’t anyone actually define their role and explicitly state what they will or won’t do when such fundamentally simple questions are asked. Is this a status thing where registered nurses have a higher status than nursing executives or is it something a little more sinister such as nursing on the cheap where nursing executives will be used to play the game of cheap nursing in much the same way as PCSO’s have been used to replace the Police and it relies upon the perceptions of authority, but in a nursing context.When I left school anyone could become a nurse and they were trained accordingly, if they were weak in one specific area they could do more training to improve their weaknesses and their abilities to actually do the job were much more important than their abilities to pass an exam, which meant that a career in nursing was open to virtually all areas of society which gave the widest remit to recruit potential candidates from. You had to have other interpersonal skills such as dealing with people with phobias such as a phobia of needles, older or elderly people with early onset, or undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, children with frightened parents, or people who were in the worst place they had ever been in their lives as well as being able to deal with horrific injuries and their consequences and remain calm through it all. Nurses were taught the academic side of things and bought up to a specific standard through their training and an over emphasis was placed on individuals who were not as intellectually intelligent as others to raise their intelligence levels and close this gap between the two as well as focusing on the practical skills and standards required, then it all changed.

Nursing recruitment changed and instead of taking on people with the right abilities and attitudes to perform well and do the job, they set high minimum entry standards for nursing recruits which required academic standards and totally omitted the need to show potential to do the practical side of the job as well as deal with people in distress, basically if you were good at passing exams you got the position and that was it. Entrants had to achieve high academic standards and obtain a degree in a small number of specific subjects which put the emphasis solely upon money as to obtain these limited number of degrees you had to go to university with the student loans and subsequent debt, so you were automatically in debt before you even began your training. The debt game begineth.This automatically ruled out many of the lower classes of students and made nursing a middle class occupation which by default meant the parents of children going into nursing had parents on higher levels of income who would often support or partially subsidise their children through university and were ripe for picking, and it took away the prospects of nursing away from the lower class and those with an aptitude for nursing and narrowed the field of applicants considerably. Today we have the problem of not enough youngsters wanting to go into nursing as a profession and those that do often cannot afford to go into it unless they take out huge loans and many young people don’t want that sort of debt around their necks as they move into their young lives as they have been at school and have never experienced life as parents have paid for everything up to now. Many existing nurses have been lured away from nursing in the NHS and gone into the private sector who cherry pick the best NHS staff and offer them regular day shifts on much better salaries and without all the stresses the NHS imposes upon them and without the patients molesting them as they often do in hospitals; and without the nightly rounds of dealing with out of control drunks, drug addicts, and homeless simply looking for a clean and warm bed for the night.We can reasonable ascertain that nursing has changed and those entering nursing can afford to be subsidised by their parents or enter into a huge debt right from the outset through having to meet this high entry criteria, or they could play the game of bringing in trained nurses from other countries and play the immigration game and pay lower wages to imported nurses.This new qualification appears little more than making up for their previous failings of not having sufficient numbers of trained nurses to cover those leaving the NHS by being lured away by private companies, or the imported nurses leaving for home as they had failed to research the costs of living in the UK and finding that they cannot afford to live in the UK on nurses wages.

What really gives it away for me is the fact that nobody will answer some simple questions such as “what are their roles and duties” and as nobody is actually answering this the only real conclusion we can draw is that the UK is getting a raft of lower trained and qualified nurses and we the public, who actually pay for them will be getting worse treatment for more money.